Jared Sandman

SPOILERS AHEAD

Live Girls is the only novel from my reading list that hasn’t been turned into a movie.  Hollywood, what are you waiting for?  There are enough terrible vampire-stripper movies on Netflix to choke a nosferatu, so it’s about time to do it right and make a good one.  You couldn’t ask for better source material than Live Girls.

The setup in a nutshell:  The main character, Davey, lives in New York City and works a dead-end job at a magazine.  His loses a vital promotion to a business rival, and then his girlfriend dumps him.  He goes for a soul-searching walk to Time’s Square, where he wanders into a strip club called Live Girls.  (Keep in mind this was Time’s Square back in the 1980s.  That strip club is probably a Starbucks now.  Or the Disney Store.)  There he meets an alluring woman called Anya, who seduces him and eventually turns him into a vampire.

The rest of the book follows Davey’s exploits as he navigates life as one of the living dead.  Along the way he meets a former reporter from The New York Times, Benedek, who’s working on a story about the peculiar goings-on at Time’s Square.  When the owner of Live Girls, the mysterious Shideh, abducts Davey’s would-be new girlfriend, Casey, Davey is forced to attack the club, save the girl he loves and fight off a horde of angry vampires . . . not to mention even worse creatures that dwell in the basement.

Yes, the book is as cool as it sounds.  It reads like a mash up between Fright Night and From Dusk Till Dawn, with a splash of “Murgunstrumm” thrown in for good measure.  It maintains a high body count, especially once Davey gets ahold on his new powers and starts exacting revenge against those who’ve wronged him.  One clever bit I liked involved what happens to vampires who feast on the blood of junkies.  The side effects aren’t pretty, and speak once again to the drug epidemic of the ‘80s.

My only objection with the book dealt with its treatment of Anya.  She’s a critical character in the story, because she’s the one who changes Davey’s life and ushers him into the world of the undead.  He’s totally enamored with this enchanting siren for the first half of the book, yet Anya suddenly drops out of the story and doesn’t surface again until the climax.  It felt like a jarring omission.  Shideh and Anya could’ve been the same person, and it wouldn’t have substantially affected the plot.  Despite Anya being treated as an afterthought, there’s an implication (never directly stated) that she escaped Live Girls during Davey’s final siege.  I know Garton has published a sequel called Night Life, so perhaps he was saving Anya’s story for another book.  That’s my hope anyway.

Overall, Live Girls is a treat.  I don’t read a lot of vampire fiction because it’s largely derivative, but Garton found a fresh twist on an old tale.  Based on my thorough enjoyment of this novel, I’ll certainly pick up Night Life in the future.

My Rating:

This book is AWESOME

SPOILERS AHEAD

Carrie is Stephen King’s first published novel, but not the first he wrote.  Counting unpublished work (at the time), it would’ve been his fourth overall.  Those others — what became known as the Bachman books — were trunk novels, and Carrie deserved to be trunked alongside them.  ‘Salem’s Lot should’ve been King’s first published book, as it’s miles ahead of Carrie in terms of storytelling and assurance of voice.  I won’t rehash the plot for you, as I’m sure you’re familiar with it:  girl with telekinesis, locker room period, prom night bloodbath, et cetera.

Had Carrie been published today, no doubt it would’ve been released as a YA book rather than an adult novel.  Editors would have made King tone it down, and I’m not sure it would have had the same impact on popular culture that it currently enjoys (thanks in large part to Brian De Palma’s classic movie).  Carrie is actually a novella that’s been padded to novel length by supplemental material like “non-fiction” book snippets and newspaper clippings that frame the story of Carrie White.  These numerous excerpts don’t add to the plot; in fact, they detract from the story’s momentum.

King did a fabulous job building reader sympathy for poor Carrie.  Everybody knows someone like Carrie from high school (or perhaps the male equivalent of Carrie).  The frumpy, the awkward, the chubby or generally dispossessed.  He gets the reader on Carrie’s side, based on her mistreatment by the other students at school, plus the emotional and psychological abuse she suffers at home from her religious zealot of a mother.  Margaret White is frightened of her daughter and believes the girl’s telekinetic powers come from the devil.  As such, she treats Carrie much like a leper and tries in vain to pray the evil out of her little girl.

My favorite scene comes when Carrie puts on her prom dress for the first time.  She cannot afford to buy a fancy outfit, so she uses her considerable skills as a seamstress to make her own dress.  Once her mother sees the finished costume, she starts calling Carrie a harlot.  Carrie takes this outburst in stride, even uses her mind powers to gently sweep her ranting mother out the door.  Carrie’s not gonna let the haters bring her down, not that night.

Except they do – in spectacular fashion.  And there’s hell to pay.

One writing quirk that struck me is King’s use of similes.  He has a knack for finding the right comparison or turn of phrase needed to bring a sentence alive.  To see it on display at so young an age — King was 25 or 26 when he wrote Carrie — took me by surprise.  At one point he describes tiles pinging off a roof “like startled pigeons.”  Perfect.  Just perfect.  King’s ability to conjure sublime figures of speech can be matched only by Joe Lansdale.

On the other hand, King also has an aggravating tendency to employ run-on parentheticals for internal dialogue.  Characters’ thoughts often break into the narrative itself, interrupting individual sentences.  He used this technique a lot in his early career but doesn’t rely on it so much anymore, preferring instead to italicize internal dialogue.

Another oddity I noticed is how many times men slap women in the story.  Seems every time something frightening happens, a woman gets all hysterical and a man has to smack some sense into her, 1940s-style.  I’ve never seen a female react like that in real life.  By the end of the book it becomes almost comical.  If you haven’t read the novel before, count how many times this happens.  You could make a drinking game out of it.

Carrie is a proper revenge fantasy, and the final act of the story is one prolonged retaliation sequence.  When Carrie finally decides to fight back against her bullies, all hell breaks loose.  She punishes not only her classmates at the prom, but the whole town of Chamberlain.  The body count is tremendous, several hundred die in the ensuing chaos, and Carrie herself takes a personal toll.

I feel about Carrie the same way I feel about another of King’s novels, Misery.  If Carrie had remained a novella, I think it would’ve had greater impact.  Of course it likely never would’ve been published at that length, so perhaps not.

My Rating:

This book is MEH

SPOILERS AHEAD

This isn’t my first Jack Ketchum book.  I’ve read Off Season, Right to Life, Red and a couple others, so I know to expect a story from Ketchum that’s gut-wrenching and grim.  The Girl Next Door certainly fits the bill, probably the bleakest of the novels I read last week.  I saw the movie when it came out a few years back — complete with Ketchum cameo as a carny — so I was already familiar with the plot.  A faithful adaptation of the novel, it was very good for a low-budget indie flick.

Quick synopsis:  A young woman is tormented by neighborhood boys in 1950s suburbia.  Teenage Meg and her younger sister Susan move in to the Chandler household after their parents die in a car crash.  Single mother Ruth Chandler has three sons of her own, so she considers the girls an additional burden.  Meg quickly forms a friendship with the boy next door (the book’s narrator), Davey.  Over the course of a summer, the Chandlers’ disregard for the girls escalates from neglect to full-blown abuse.  Eventually Meg is chained up in the basement, beaten for entertainment and left to starve (and worse) while all the neighborhood kids watch out of twisted fascination.  Ruth Chandler even urges them to join in and use Meg to act out their sickest fantasies.

Ketchum writes in the afterword that the novel is based loosely on real-life events that happened in 1965.  I don’t find that hard to believe, especially after recent news out of Cleveland involving the abduction and torture of three young women over a decade.  Truth is always stranger than fiction.

If Lord of the Flies portrays what happens to children free of adult supervision, The Girl Next Door depicts what happens when kids are encouraged by a parental figure to act like animals.  The main character, Davey, never directly participates in Meg’s exploitation, though he’s well aware of what’s going on next door.  It takes him two months to grow a conscience (finally!) before he resolves to help Meg and Susan escape their captors.  Sadly, that escape attempt doesn’t go as planned, which leads to the most depressing ending since John Fowles’ The Collector.

Ketchum gets the reader invested in Meg and Davey’s blossoming relationship, and he takes great care to make Meg a three dimensional person, not merely an object of desire that the other boys see.  We like Meg; we root for Meg; we want to see her triumph over her kidnappers . . . and then turn on them with suitable retribution.  This never happens, which leaves readers in the lurch.  What’s a revenge fantasy without the vengeance?  If you want to see that, pick up Dean Koontz’s Intensity.

I have two minor quibbles with the story itself.  First is with Meg’s sister Susan.  The girl is underutilized, used only as leverage against Meg.  For example, if Meg refuses her cruel treatment, punishment will befall Susan.  This forces Meg to endure the most atrocious behavior out of love for her sibling.  Susan, however, is never brought to life as her own character.

The other issue I have is a bit broader.  The book is told from Davey’s point of view, much later in his life as he looks back at the terrible events from the summer of 1958.  This gives him time to reflect on the choices he made, and for him to realize what monsters they were as children.  He knows he should’ve acted sooner to help Meg.  This is the only right way to tell the story; otherwise, the reader would have zero sympathy for Davey.  No, my objection comes when young Davey finally decides to help Meg.  He has a guilt dream about Meg that almost (but not quite) makes him tell his parents about what’s happening at the Chandler house.  This is the moment when our protagonist — I won’t use the word hero, because there are no heroes in his book — goes from reactive to proactive.  This is a big deal, big enough that a mere nightmare doesn’t do it justice.  I would’ve liked to see some more dramatic event impel Davey into action:  having the other kids force him to hurt Meg, for instance.

Nitpickings aside, this was a great book.  It’s an emotionally draining read, and afterward makes you feel like you’ve just run the gauntlet of a street gang.

My Rating:

This Book is AWESOME

After reading about 2,100 pages over the past week, I’m getting my thoughts in order and have started formulating individual reviews.  I don’t use a rating system for books; instead I categorize them by how they made me feel when I finished them.  My personal barometer looks like this:

Awesome – I loved the book and will harangue others into reading it.

Meh – I finished it with a shrug.  Others might like it, but it wasn’t for me.

Bullshit – Didn’t care for the book at all, had major issues with either the plot or the writing itself.

*             *             *             *

SPOILERS AHEAD

Let’s start with the obvious:   The Exorcist movie is better than the book.  Way better.  The strange thing is that Blatty wrote them both.  Hell, the author won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay based on his own novel.  A few years ago Blatty re-released the book for its fortieth anniversary and took the opportunity to polish it up and make some small fixes that had bothered him.  I read the original version from the 1970s, so I cannot speak to how the versions differ.  If anyone’s compared and contrasted the two narratives, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

My issues with the story stem from dual sources:  too many characters don’t add value to the plot, and too much action takes place “off screen.”  The main characters are Chris MacNeil, a movie star, and her 11-year-old daughter Regan, neither of whom is particularly endearing.  In fact the girl is a tad annoying and never quite comes together as her own person, rather remains defined by her mother (and later by the demon Pazuzu).  Regan is only treated as Chris MacNeil’s kid, daughter of a famous actress.

Chris is far too narcissistic for us to be emotionally invested in her plight.  Long after her daughter exhibits signs of severe physical and psychological distress, Chris is still debating whether to take Regan to the hospital or accept a movie gig in Europe.  Seriously?  What sort of mother would vacillate like that?  Besides a bad one, I mean.

Beyond that the story’s padded unnecessarily by other characters and subplots that water down the urgency of the main narrative.  We don’t care about Chris’ drunk director boss, or the two housekeepers, or Chris’ personal secretary, or that bumbling detective Kinderman who can’t keep his mouth shut.

The only other people who matter are Father Karras, the young psychiatrist-priest who’s lost his faith, and Father Merrin, the experienced priest who once fought the same demon that’s possessed Regan.  A lot of people claim Karras is the titular exorcist; I believe the title refers to Merrin, because during the scenes of exorcism at the end of the book Blatty differentiates between the two priests as “the exorcist and the psychiatrist.”  Your interpretation may differ, and I could be mistaken.  Merrin himself is only utilized for about thirty pages, a shame since he’s the most interesting character in the story.

The narrative itself could’ve been much more dynamic.  Too many of the pivotal scenes take place out of sight, and none is told from Regan’s point of view.  Two of the most important sequences in the entire book are off limits to the reader.  During the exorcism, for instance, Merrin tells Karras to leave him alone with the demon; when Karras returns later, Merrin’s dead beside Regan’s bed.

Are you kidding me? I sat through almost 400 pages to get to the exorcism, the point of the whole damn book, and we don’t even get to see Merrin and the demon fight to the death?  By this point Blatty’s lost my trust as a storyteller (the kiss of death for any writer).

Then Blatty slings that same weak shit again after Karras takes up the fight against Pazuzu.  The story cuts to the other characters listening downstairs to the sounds of struggle in Regan’s bedroom.  Then they hear the CRASH of a windowpane and look outside to find Karras’ mangled body on the steps below.

Really? I wanted to hurl the book across the room.  That’s six hours of my life I can’t get back.

Add to this Blatty’s weird use of language at times.  For example, at one point he has a character set down a vase or something “on a table the color of sadness.”  What color is sadness, exactly?  Is it like a tartan?  For that matter, how does a rainbow taste?  Regular readers may not notice quirks like this, but for any writer it’s like a thumb in the eye.

I feel Blatty used the screenplay to take another crack at the story, this time more successfully.  He cut out the boring parts, streamlined the cast of characters and made the remaining scenes more dramatic.  The issues I have with the book simply aren’t in the film.  Do yourself a favor – skip the book and pop in the DVD instead.

My Rating:

This book is BULLSHIT

Normally I don’t write book reviews, because they’re as plentiful as weeds and just as useful.  Check out my profile on Goodreads to view the handful of “reviews” I’ve done in the past.  You’ll notice I don’t comment on books I didn’t like, mostly because I tend not to finish those that didn’t resonate with me.

Last week I sifted through my to-be-read pile and realized there were several titles present that I should have read by now.  We all have those type of books, the “classics” you promised yourself to get around to one day and never have.  (For me, Ghost Story, Dracula and Rosemary’s Baby are still on that mental checklist.)  I set out to remedy that situation, so I pulled seven classic horror novels from the stack and have read one per day for the past week.

Every day I’ll write up a new review of each novel, warts and all.  If you’re looking for an in-depth critique, you’re better served elsewhere.  These are more my impressions, the stream-of-conscious thoughts I jotted down while reading the stories:  the things that struck me hardest, either as a reader or as a writer.  My criteria for choosing is that each book had to be short enough to read in a day — so no hernia-inducers like The Stand — only one book per author and preferably something scary.

I had a similar list when I was in junior high school; back then the classics included Psycho, I Am Legend, The Haunting of Hill House and Something Wicked This Way Comes, among others.  I went about tracking down each novel as though it was a scavenger hunt, and I greedily devoured them all.  It’s actually a fun exercise that I recommend to everyone.  At the very least it’s a great way to knock down your TBR pile to a manageable size.

Find out which ones left me saying, “This book is AWESOME!” and which ones made me shout, “This book is BULLSHIT!”  Feel free to add your own remarks about the books, or to admit which classic horror novels you’ve neglected so far.

Here’s my final list; reviews are forthcoming later this week.

The Exorcist – William Peter Blatty

The Girl Next Door – Jack Ketchum

Carrie – Stephen King

Jaws – Peter Benchley

Live Girls – Ray Garton

The Manitou – Graham Masterton

Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Jack Finney

The Bram Stoker Awards were handed out a couple of weeks back, at the World Horror Convention in New Orleans.  Congratulations to all the winners.  (List taken from SF Signal.)  In addition Robert McCammon and Clive Barker were honored with the Lifetime Achievement Awards given out by the HWA.

• Superior Achievement in a NOVEL: The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL: Life Rage by L.L. Soares
• Superior Achievement in a YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry
• Superior Achievement in a GRAPHIC NOVEL: Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Timesby Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton
• Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION: The Blue Heron by Gene O’Neill
• Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION: Magdala Amygdala? by Lucy Snyder
• Superior Achievement in a SCREENPLAY: The Cabin in the Woods by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard
• Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY: Shadow Show edited by Mort Castle and Sam Weller
• Superior Achievement in a FICTION COLLECTION (tie):
  • New Moon on the Water by Mort Castle
  • Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
• Superior Achievement in NON-FICTION: Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton
• Superior Achievement in a POETRY COLLECTIONL Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls by Marge Simon

Richard Matheson passed away this week at the age of 87.  Anyone who follows this blog has heard me mention that name many times before, and for good reason.  Matheson was a huge influence on my writing, one of three writers whose work I actively studied in my early years (the other two being Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury).  His first book I read was I Am Legend, at age 14.  But I was familiar with his stories before then, I just didn’t know of the man behind the work.  My very first encounter was probably The Night Stalker, a popular made-for-TV movie he adapted from a novel by Jeff Rice.

Matheson wrote prolifically for Hollywood, both films and television.  He published several dozen short stories between 1950 and 1970 before abandoning short fiction altogether.  His first story, “Born of Man and Woman,” was an instant classic, and one of his final tales, “Duel,” helped launch Steven Spielberg’s directing career.  He adapted several others for the original Twilight Zone, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “The Invaders” and “Little Girl Lost.”

In terms of novels, he wrote a few classics:  I Am Legend (the world overrun by vampires), Hell House (the Mount Everest of haunted houses) and What Dreams May Come (a journey into the afterlife).

Matheson taught me the economy of storytelling.  He had a minimalist style, stark to the point of noir at times, which worked well for screenwriting.  He made every word count.  His prose was like a scalpel, so sharp you didn’t feel the blade go in until the story’s final gut-wrenching twist.

Rare is the genre writer of the past 50 years who doesn’t owe a debt to Richard Matheson, Mr. Paranoia.

UPDATE:  I linked to this a couple years back, thought it was an appropriate time to draw your attention to it once again.  Considering how quiet and modest Matheson remained throughout life, this extensive interview (over three hours long!) is likely the closest thing to an autobiography that he left behind.

This week Amazon premiered a new feature through its upstart movie studio.  It’s called Amazon Storyteller, and you can read about it here.  Basically it’ll turn any uploaded screenplay into a rough storyboard, which can help both writers and producers in selling their projects (to Amazon).  Right now Storyteller is in beta mode, and more options will be added over time.  I have yet to see any actual storyboards, so I can’t speak to the quality of the final product.  Still, a cool idea.

Speaking of storyboards, check out this hand-drawn pictorial of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the whole novel synopsized in two and a half minutes.  Entertaining and informative.

Couple of notable items this morning, as a tropical storm sweeps overhead and the rain keeps coming down.  First is an article from i09 about sci-fi writers and their workspaces.  I find it interesting to dissect a writer’s work area and see the actual spot where his or her creativity takes place.  Make sure to check out the comment section as well, where several posters added even more pictures of authors hard at work.  (Here’s another one from a few years back, though I suspect more than a few of the writers tidied up their offices before being photographed.)

Last month in Publishers Weekly a blogger posted about receiving a fan letter from a young woman who had read one of her books many years ago.  It’s worth sharing because notes like these are a huge inspiration to authors.  If you really like a book, it’s never been easier to get in touch with the author via social media.

Last week Joss Whedon gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, Wesleyan University.  Here’s the complete transcript, full of that trademark Whedon wit and pathos.  He talks about how Baby Boomers broke the world, and implores the next generation to fix it, um, somehow.

And I saw this new Audi ad that I had to share.  This is how brand marketing should be done.